Alvin Cullum York

York died on 2 September 1964 at the Veterans Administration hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, aged 76. He had suffered a stroke in 1954 and was bedridden for the last years of his life.

He is buried at Wolf River Cemetery in Pall Mall, Tennessee, in the valley where he was born.

Alvin Cullum York was born on 13 December 1887 in a two-room log cabin in Pall Mall, Tennessee, the third of eleven children. His father was a blacksmith and subsistence farmer. He had about nine months of schooling in his life.

He was drafted in 1917 and applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, writing on the form: "Don't want to fight." His church held that killing was forbidden. His company commander and battalion commander argued scripture with him for a night and a day, and he came back from leave having decided he could serve.

On 8 October 1918, in the Meuse-Argonne, seventeen men under Acting Sergeant Bernard Early went behind German lines to silence the machine guns that had halted the advance the day before. It was cold and wet, rain turning to sleet, fog on the ground. York was the company sharpshooter.

As they worked around the hill, the men on the left flank stood exposed in the creek bottom and the German gunners opened on them. Nine Americans were killed or wounded in the first minutes, among them York's closest friend, Murray Savage. York was on the right flank in a natural depression beneath the crest of the hill, and he fought from it.

He accounted for the guns one by one with a rifle and a pistol. When six men charged him with bayonets he shot them from back to front, so the ones in front would not see the ones behind fall and go to ground. The German officer commanding the position surrendered what remained, and York and seven surviving men walked 132 prisoners back to the American line.

He was promoted to sergeant and given the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the French Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour. He refused the money that came after - the endorsements, the film offers, the vaudeville circuit - and went home to Tennessee.

What he took instead was a school. He spent the rest of his life raising money for the Alvin C. York Agricultural Institute in Jamestown, because the children of the valley had no more schooling available to them than he had. He mortgaged his own farm for it.

He married Gracie Williams in 1919, on a ceremony performed by the governor of Tennessee, and they had eight children.